The words written on the paper of a letter or a postcard connect two people in two different places—they travel a distance, cross several cities, sometimes even countries. These correspondences form a kind of memory, a material memory that might one day be found at a flea market among trinkets, in a dusty attic, or, as was the case for Jean Vidal, in the garden of an abandoned house in his childhood village in Ardèche. Jean Vidal entrusted it to Guy Gilles, the perfect person to take care of this treasure and linger over it. Because Guy Gilles’ cinema is one of traces, of remnants. In his films, the use of photographs and postcards testifies to a lingering trace of time, of people, of their imprint, their passage, and then their absence.

Filmed a year before his masterpiece Le clair de Terre, Vies retrouvées is a film about time slipping away—time one wishes to stop or recover—with Gilles not hesitating to quote Proust. But above all, based on this love correspondence, it becomes an investigation, with clues and interrogations: administrative documents are sought out, places mentioned are explored. Many have changed, some no longer exist, mere ghosts of places—destroyed by World War II or transformed by modernity. Gilles and Vidal trace time backward to see just how much it has changed, and today’s images collide with the words of the past. The investigation continues. They question the fading memories behind the wrinkled faces of the Ardèche region. Soon, no one will remember Germaine, that Parisian woman who came to live out her final days alone in the town of Les Vans, if not for the quest of Guy Gilles and his accomplice Jean Nadal. In focusing on these traces, Guy Gilles does not adopt a purely melancholic or nostalgic gaze—no, through his work as a filmmaker engaging with the archive, he tells time through materiality; he extends the past to better enrich the present. Quests are often driven by curiosity, and once that curiosity is satisfied or fades, what remains is tenderness.

Samuel Cogrenne